On Missing the Eucharist
Hi friends,
I hope you’re enjoying what you can have of a summer. My husband and kids and I have temporarily left NYC for Connecticut. We rented a house for six weeks, and it’s nice for all of us to have a yard (an actual yard!) and some space for a little bit. That being said, I’m also weirdly looking forward to getting back to the city at the end of the month, even though it’s a city that still feels mostly shut down. The spring was so hard, and it’s kind of a relief for me that NYC still feels like home.
In June, my church formed a committee to discuss how to create safe and beautiful liturgy as we think about reopening. I was invited to be a part of this, and so this month I spent time on Zoom calls talking about how to create better online liturgy and how to keep a sense of community as some people come back to in-person church and some people choose to stay home for safety reasons and, frankly, how to do in-person liturgy at all. There were good ideas, especially as regards the paradoxical opportunity to create more intimate liturgy in the wake of COVID. But we’re not really close to in-person church yet, and mostly what these calls did is make me miss the Eucharist even more than I did before.
The Eucharist has always felt like the center of my spiritual life. In high school, when I got a car, one of the things I was most excited about was being able to go to daily mass. I left the Catholic church in large part because the church wouldn’t let me get as close to the Eucharist as I was compelled to be. When I returned to Christianity, I became Episcopalian because I couldn’t imagine a church service not centered around the Eucharist. This sacrament is the source of many of my most mystical theological beliefs. It’s when I feel closest to God. It’s the ritual which is at the dead center of my religious life. The last few months have been so difficult, and living through them without the Eucharist has felt spiritually isolating.
I, like most people, have spent the last few months feeling isolated (somehow, despite living with a husband and two small children). I miss moving through crowds of people. I miss the anonymity of sitting in a coffee shop. I miss going to the Met, and the particular intimacy of looking at the same piece of art with a stranger. And I miss church. I miss receiving communion on Sundays and feeling connected, in a tangible way, to the millions of other people receiving communion on a given Sunday morning. Zoom church does its very best, but its very much is only so much.
I’ve found myself responding to this lack of physical sacrament by slowly becoming more and more obsessed with a certain genre of medieval art that centers around the wounds of Jesus. Devotion to the wounds of Jesus was a big deal in the Middle Ages. These are the five wounds Jesus suffered during the crucifixion--two in the hands, two in the feet, one in the side (which eventually, over time, became the devotion to the Sacred Heart which is more familiar today). I keep returning to this weird medieval art -- images of pierced, free-floating hands and feet and vaginal-looking side wounds. At night before bed I Google stuff like “medieval Jesus wound” and then I scroll through images and then I go to sleep and dream about them.
I love the bodiliness of these images. A thing I like so much about medieval art and theology (and take this with a grain of salt, I’m not a medievalist) is that they weren’t afraid of the body. It was normal to contemplate the very real, very human wounds of Christ. These images of Christ’s wounds are found all over medieval prayer books. Some of these books have images of Christ’s side wound that show signs of being rubbed to almost nothing, a meditation of touch. (I could write a whole hell of a lot about how vaginal these images of Christ’s side wound are, but that’s for another email.) That kind of physical contemplation of Christ’s body is especially moving to me right now, during a time when most of us can’t be together and all spiritual connection is virtual.
I don’t know when I’ll receive the Eucharist again. My church hasn’t yet set a date for in-person Eucharistic services, and we’re erring on the side of caution, so it will likely be some time. But contemplating this art, for me, feels almost like a sacrament. It’s certainly as close to physical communion as I can get right now. It makes this weird, virtual desert feel a little less vast. Also, if you're in the same boat as me right now, tell me how you're dealing with it. I'd love to know.